The Fall "Grotesque Live" Ltd Edition (300) Red Vinyl + signed card New 2024

	£		50
	$		66

The Fall "Grotesque (After The Gramme) Live!" Popstock POP002V  Red Vinyl, LP issued by Rough Trade as a Limited Edition of 300, with a signed print, in 2024. The LP is new and unplayed, so it is in mint condition, as is the sleeve and signed print. 

Live4ever Review25 October, 2024 by Andy Peterson "The assembled remains of The Fall’s new live album are almost perfect in their chaotic blemishes and imperfections. Collisions are rarely nice. Bootlegging gigs is a practice as old as the technology to record live music itself, but the artists’ complaints were always that they had no control over the quality of the product and, more importantly, that they very rarely got paid. Phones these days can mean that to an extent the whole practice is redundant, but for Manchester curmudgeons The Fall, a hyper obsessive fanbase and mini tape recorders made for an open market on their concert work for decades. Live they could be literally anything on the spectrum between electric to abysmal, with the chief predicator being the mood of singer Mark. E. Smith. With a rolling line-up, The Fall was a band who infamously broke up mid-gig on stage in New York in 1998, but in their earlier years at least there was a little more stability, and some wonderfully combustible music to play. Grotesque (After the Gramme) was the band’s second album for Geoff Travis’ Rough Trade label, and Smith’s Loki-esque approach to the whole thing was summed up by the release of its predecessor Totale’s Turns. Recorded mostly live in northern working men’s clubs in front of indifferent audiences, on it the singer taunted punters and abused those on stage with him. He was told it would be commercial suicide; he insisted it was released anyway. Its follow up was preceded by the non-album single and John Peel Festive Fifty Staple to be How I Wrote Elastic Man, but as much known for Smith’s acidic wit as much as their music, he described its truculent, roustabout musical style as ‘Country n’ Northern’. This being The Fall, the entire thing has been deconstructed lyrically, politically and spiritually on several occasions over the years, so if you need to know that stuff then let that research be your homework.
Of real interest here is how this version came about; original members Paul Hanley, Steve Hanley, Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon were getting fed up with the substandard tapes they were being randomly approached with, not to mention the lack of compensation. As a response, they settled on a unique solution in approaching The Fall’s army of anoraked followers for the material they’d acquired over the years and then reassembling the best bits into an official bootleg of their own, brought out on their own label. The assembled remains are almost perfect in their chaotic blemishes and imperfections: as at a real Fall gig, there’s little connectivity or consistency, but the gonzo Pay Your Rates rips the flock wallpaper off whatever dive it’s being played in, English Scheme shows that Smith et al could do (twisted) pop if they wanted, whilst CnC Stop Mithering is the kind of dirgeful squabble between atonal scree and northern industrial funk that became their hallmark. Whilst outsiders struggled to get it, the Marmite essence of The Fall’s early incarnations is faithfully captured here. New Face in Hell rumbles threateningly, Smith’s gnostic amphetamine drawl yipping and howling, whilst The Container Drivers has the primacy of rock n’ roll at its heart, the singer a kind of Prestwich Elvis pin eyed on blues and eleven pints of bitter. If you liked that (what are we saying, you probably have every record they ever made), then you’ll love the near ten minute closer The NWRA, more of a manifesto than a song, a series of gut punches you’ll either get or give. The bootleg’s not dead then, and collisions are rarely nice, but Mark E. Smith specialised in ones between him and everything he ever touched. Grotesque (After The Gramme) ‘Live’ is a boogie seance, a cacophonous, ghostly pile up you really should bring your friends and a four pack to."